Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Ecuador: What is Workaway?

As you read this blog and my recents posts about our current life in Ecuador you may be wondering how in the world we ended up in Ecuador and why.

Most of you know that Dean and I love traveling. We met traveling in college on Semester at Sea and we've continued our travels through our relationship and marriage. We've been to over 30 countries together and don't plan to stop! But now we are a family now and it isn't quite as easy to just take off anytime anywhere. There's a financial piece too. How do we afford it? What about jobs? That part will be a separate post so stay tuned.

We first decided that we wanted to spend a few months in Ecuador and we were brainstorming ideas about how we could make it happen. We both love to research and with the internet at our fingertips we began a zillion searches. That's when I happened upon the website www.Workaway.info. It's a website that connects hosts with volunteers all over the world. The hosts are looking for volunteer help for anything from A to Z and volunteers give 20-25 hours a week of their time in exchange for room and board! Say what?! Aside from flights, room and board is usually your BIGGEST expense while traveling! This is HUGE! And you can literally find anything you can imagine to do...anywhere! I'm not joking guys, check out the website!

Anyway we loved the idea of doing this for a portion of our trip. After lots of searching and communicating with potential hosts, we arranged to stay with a family on their farm outside of Quito. They raise pigs & chickens, have 7 dogs, and a son turning 1. They are from the US but have been living in Ecuador for the last 6 years. As we are traveling as a family, we agreed that I may not be able to 'work' the full hours so we were going to chip in a bit for food costs. Still an amazing deal for a unique traveling and volunteering experience.

I can't recommend the experience highly enough. More posts to come on our 10 day Workaway experience including what we did, what we ate, our accommodations, etc.